As a society, we routinely engage in self-sacrificing activities for "the good of mankind".
There's big difference between voluntary and involuntary. And exploiting the desperate and sick while still calling it "voluntary" on their part is dishonest about the situation. At best its 'semi-voluntary'. If they wouldn't do it if they weren't sick or desperate than its not really completely voluntary. When I give blood, that's completely voluntary.
Stories like this play on fear, promoting the idea that pharmaceutical companies are careless and cavalier about running harmful clinical trials, when the reality is that of the tens of thousands of drug trials run every year, this one is notable specifically because it had a bad outcome.
I was specifically responding to a post wherein it was proposed that we take MORE risks with medical trials. The reason the incidence of these outcomes is so low, is precisely because the protocols in place work. Relaxing them WOULD result in more of these incidents.
There are no advertising campaigns for clinical trials, though.
Your implicit assertion is that it's fine to sacrifice the few for the many, anyway.
No. It wasn't. The opposite generally.
What is actually fair, just, free, and utilitarian is giving individuals the right over their own body to volunteer for drug trials for the compensation they demand.
Sure. But that's not reality. Negotiation is never on equal footing. The poor and sick don't have the freedom to just walk away from the table if their compensation demands aren't met... they don't have a gun to their head, but they do not have good options. They cannot negotiate good deals for themselves.
And worse, if negotiation itself isn't one of their skills, they lack the resources to hire one to represent their interests better than they could.
Meanwhile, the person on the other side of the table, still eats and lives if they don't close the deal; and in many cases recruitment is their actual job -- this act of negotiation is the specific thing they are trained to do, and they are successul at their job because they are good at it.
To call it a 'free, just, and fair' when one side is severely handicapped is ridiculous bullshit.
Might as well put a guy who only plays poker once a year and barely knows the rules against a guy who plays poker professionally. On top of that the casual player will lose his apartment or be forced to drop school if he doesn't take home some winnings so he's under a lot of pressure to win, to take unnecessary risks, while the pro is financially secure, doesn't need to win, and can easily afford to lose and can make the best decision based purely on the odds (which he actually knows, while the other party is just roughly guessing at them). That's a fair match right? I mean... the deck itself is only metaphorically stacked against the poor guy, its not literally stacked against him. So... fair?
Bullshit.
And THAT is how fair the average negotiation between a poor person and a corporation is, for anything...a job, a dispute, a settlement, anything.
I'll give you a no strings attached voluntary negotiation between parties for compensation for medical testing or anything else, when it's actually a level field.
Worried that poor people will disproportionately sign up for drug trials because it pays well? Poor people are already at higher risk for injury and death and so for them it makes financial sense to better their lives at a small risk compared to their overall risk due to poverty.
The point being that the risk small to sign up precisely because of the controls in place. If we removed those controls, the risk goes up. Given that the poor do not have good options in the first place, upping the risk just forces them to assume more risk. They don't have the bargaining power to negotiate for more compensation to offset that risk. That becomes exploitation.
Maybe the timing and availability are part of what they are looking for.
If they'd hired him, he'd be available.
And as for the timing, what hypothetical requirement would require that you be 'available to hire' on an arbitrary schedule?
The only candidate who would satisfy that requirement would be someone who was chronically unemployed or unemployable.
Is the idea of a "job" about you, or about the person who is willing to trade the food for the work?
Its about both. If a person expects me to sit around not trading food for work with someone else on the chance that he may wish to trade food for my work at some point one day... I'm not going to starve myself waiting on him.
I have to eat every day. You may not need me to work everyday. But if you want me to make an agreement with you such that you'll provide me food in exchange for work, AND you want exclusive access to my availability so that I am available to work when you need me to work, then you're going to have to provide me food even on days you don't need the the work. Because I'm not going to sit there and fast on the days you don't need me. And trading work for food ad hoc 'day laborer' style on the days you don't need me creates stress i don't need, work i don't want to do, and bottom line is that I can get a better deal from someone else who is willing to commit to providing me food daily, in exchange for that exclusivity and availability.
If we setup the tax system to provide me a living wage, then at that point, I'd be willing to try out your system of work-as-needed when needed for pay for the time i work.
But short of that, its not going to happen. I've specialized to do a certain type of work, and live in proximity to where that work is needed. I don't have the necessary hunter gatherer skills, nor do i live in a place where i could use them if I had them -- and neither does anybody else like me. So if you want us to do this specialized work for you, you'll need to commit to providing all my food requirements.
IF you and others like you are who need this sort of work done are not willing to, then I WILL work on my hunter gatherer skills, move somewhere where I can use them.
As it happens I do consulting; and in this role, I AM in fact willing to work for you for short stints. But I am not sitting there on a chair waiting for you to call. If you want that arrangement, fine, but then your going to need to provide food while sit there.
So instead I make deals with others all the time for short stints, so when you do call me I might not be available that day or even that week. AND I get paid quite a bit more food, because I do sometimes have stretches of not working, so I need extra food to cover that. And I'm not going to work for anyone whose just covering the food i need that for just that day, since they aren't committed to giving me work or food tomorrow.
Though no one wants to be the one who dies in testing, bringing effective drugs to mass market years, or even months faster could save many more lives than they cost in riskier testing.
That's a utilitarian argument. Morally, justifying something by putting the good of mankind over an individual leads to all kinds of truly ugly nastiness.
There are situations, of course, where people need to be sacrificed for the good of others, or the good of all, but in my opinion they are the exception.
And medical testing in particular preys on those who are desperate, or financially in need already. They may not have a gun to your head, but in most cases its not like they'd be taking the drugs if they had better choices.
Exactly right. And its also exactly right that the prosecutors office investigate to make sure that all protocols were followed.
This sort of thing is rare because the protocols to get a drug approved for human testing generally work. We know occasionally there will be events like this and its a risk we take. But in an event like this we need to establish that nobody was playing fast and loose with the protocols. Make sure data wasn't faked, make sure anything that might have predicted this wasn't suppressed or concealed, make sure the test subjects were being properly monitored, etc.
I always include a link in comments to the source of the borrowed code (or approach), because the relevant discussion will illuminate the how and why far better than a large block comment.
5, 10, or 15 years from now a 404 error illuminates nothing.
If the snippet really needs/benefits from the explanation/discussion, I usually save the page / article to PDF, with url in the header, and include that in the project, and then reference that file in the comments.
I've run into enough 404 errors over the years, where the site I originally referenced is gone, or reorganized (Microsoft for example) or have gone to a paywall model, or even cases where the article has been edited or altered; or taken down by the author so he could posted an updated one or any other reason.
I don't object to the concept of linking to the live article, but I'm not willing to take the chance that it won't be there if i ever need it.
I've never really considered whether the practice raises its own copyright issues. It probably does... so I guess it won't work where the source is being redistributed. Which is unfortunate really.
I did a SSD on a similiar macbook pro this year, along with a battery replacement. (i used ifixit actually). The stock drives are 5400rpm. It definitely makes a difference.
And sooner or later, that's going to happen with chat as well.
Will it though? The technology to allow interoperability has existed for years. The companies do not want interoperability though. They want to advertise, and to advertise they need control of the client.
since companies are still figuring out what to do with these messenger services and how to encode and encrypt data, and interoperate and propagate presence data in real time.
No. Its not really tricky at all to send messages to someone else. Solutions to these problems have existed for years.
your chat name could soandso@domain; a domain is mapped to a service provider. so you can be john@gmail served by gmail. or you can be john@personaldomain served by gmail, or john@personaldomain served by msn. etc, etc.
Pick a standard port number. Message Routing is solved. Preserve the message is't delivered if you aren't mutual contacts, and spam is managed. Contact management itself is a solved problem as well.
presense propagation is as simple as registering your status with your service when you connect. there are a few strategies for communicating it from there to other services. Its not especially diffiicult.
Solutions already exist. (e.g. Jabber federation)
The companies are not "figuring out how to do it"; they've figured out that they don't want to do it. Facebook doesn't want any one messaging anyone using a client other than FB messenger. Skype doesn't want anyone messaging anyone using a client other than skype. etc etc. They all want lock-in and user counts... that creates value for their advertising efforts.
Look at Pidgin the "universal chat client". What there is mostly stuff from the 90s... ICQ, AIM, MSN. And even those don't actually talk to eachother, no pidgin still needs you to have an account on *each* supported network; and messages need to go between them. And what about the big new protocols in use?
No skype, whats app, imessage, instagram, steam, fb messenger... practically all the big new protocols go out of the way to prevent you using an unsanctioned client. And they certainly aren't interested in letting you send message outside of their networks.
Google, the one company that was allowing XMPP federation; stopped.
Chat is steadily becoming increasingly more closed.
FB can wind up abandoned as quickly as it gained steam. We saw that with Geocities, Hotmail, and MySpace. I can trust AT&T to be around a long time.
AT&T can fall off the map tomorrow, and phone numbers continue to work around the world. The advantage of phone and email (as technologies) over facebook messenger is that they aren't tied to a particular company AT ALL.
My email address will work independently of any company. And i move my email address from host company to company, as I see fit, or even self host if I feel the need.
My phone, likewise, I've moved between multiple carriers over the years; if carrier A started pissing me off too much, I'd move to carrier B.
The idea that you can have a messenger account with out a facebook account is just smoke and mirrors... of course you have a facebook account.
No, the crook just installs an alternative OS (like CyanogenMod) developed in another country which doesn't have the backdoor, then enable full-device encryption as usual.
LMAO.
*I* have yet to install an alternative OS on my phone. And I'm *IN* the demographic that does that sort of thing. And in the demographic that likes to do that sort of thing.
It's not as if you have to be an expert in programming and cryptography just to install and use secure software which someone else wrote.
Gotcha, so lets say we believed Windows was beholden to government masters and spooks... (wait we DO already beleive that don't we? If not as a certainty, than as a likelihood).
So criminals obviously being risk-averse must all be using something like Tails linux right? Nope... they still use windows.
'Normal' don't install alternative OSes on anything. Criminals and Terrorists... are mostly drawn from normal people. They drive cars with OnStar enabled, they use Androids and iphones and computers and tablets all with stock OSes, they sign up for xbox live with their real names. They take the same route to work every day. They pay with credit and debit cards. They don't throw away the shoes and clothes they wore when committing a crime. They don't vacuum every stray bit of hair, lint, and dead skin out of a rental car before returning it. Etc.
There are lots of things they could do to further avoid detection and capture that they don't do, because they are mostly normal.
Its hard to imagine how this could *ever* be a law I would support; due to my support for free speech and other principles.
But at the same time, I know that in most cases the posting photos of accident victims, and accidents etc to facebook and twitter is supremely disrespectful and only serves to fulfill the posters own ego and thirst for attention. Its morally indefensible.
Swing and a critical miss. How much of a tech-savvy super villain do you think you need to be to flip an option in device settings, choose a password and wait a while until it reboots?
What you gibbering about? That doesn't help you if that built in encryption is backdoored, which is precisely the scenario in question here.
If the built in encryption is backdoored, Then you have to add your own encryption layers. And that isn't something the average crook is going to try do, or get right even if he tries.
a) His point is Snowden wouldn't compromise his trust in the first place, because he's not committing and concealing tons of crimes.
b) His point is that even if Snowden did compromise him, and leaked his activities... well... it would be an uninteresting list that practically nobody would care about it.
As he said, he is *SNOWDEN* proof. He is not *hacker proof*.
Would it not be easier just to have everything priced appropriately?
That would hold only if everything was only purchased one at a time with nothing else in the transaction. Most transactions involve a variable number of items, and multiple items.
In Canada without the penny, something priced.99 and.98 are both a $1 if you pay cash. But if you buy 2 99 cent items its 2$ vs 2 98 cent items cost $1.95. On a shopping cart full of groceries your bill ends up within a couple cents of where it would have been otherwise.
. I'd be willing to bet there are a lot more products priced to round up rather than down sitting on the shop shelves.
At retail most priceses ended in 9 anyway, and always have. So that hasn't changed. The psychological value of not rolling over to the next dollar overweighs any effect the loss of the penny had.
And items bought in bulk... people still price and haggle to the penny, or even sub-penny per unit. Because $0.002 on a 100,000 lot of widgets or as a royalty on a million units... is still money on the bottom line.
Preventing hardware manufacturers from building strong encryption into their products accomplishes nothing.
False. It makes strong encryption off by default. So that instead just working out of the box, people have to decide to encrypt something, and go out of there way to locate and use tools to encrypt something; and deal with the hoops and hassles because its not baked in.
That accomplishes *something* pretty significant.
What this does is expose normal users to security risks, while *doing nothing to prevent any determined user to encrypt whatever the hell they want*
Swing and a miss. You are absolutely right to say that normal users are vulnerable and that determined savvy users will encrypt whatever they want.
Your unspoken assumption that terrorists and criminals are in the "determined users" category, however, is false.
Criminals and terrorists ARE mostly so-called "normal users". The vast majority of them aren't tech savvy super villains. Many of them (most of them!) aren't going to take the extra step of encrypting their communications. The recent attacks in france are a case in point -- they used good old fashioned un-encrypted SMS messages to coordinate.
Sure. But I shouldn't have to make excuses for the critters. That's the storyteller's job. (ie the movie). The critters could have simply run around with a bunch of their prey instead of just Finn... hell having Rey seal a door and rescue not just Finn, but also incidently save a thug... that would have been better. Even if said thug promptly got re-snagged...
It wasn't a well written scene. But it wasn't a "plot breaker"; like some of the other stuff.
On the other hand, Luke (at IV-V) and even moreso Ren were just posers in comparation.
Sure. But if we accept that proposition, then its ludicrous that Ren's in such a position of power and authority; acting crazy with impunity. A disgruntled storm trooper would have helped him into a bottomless pit a while ago, with a few blaster holes in his facemask.
Because if your saying Ren is Luke from a new hope, then putting him in such a position of authority on the new death star makes as much sense making Luke the commander of the rebel fleet. Remeber? They didn't even make him a suadron commander. He was just Red-5.
And, if your saying Ren was just getting out of his sith diapers, then that's what Ren should have been here. Reporting to the shiny stormtrooper and being sent to his room for a time out for breaking the computer. Do that and the his ass whooping by Rey even makes sense, and creates motivation for him want to save face by dealing with Rey in the upcoming sequels, as she develops into a Jedi he develops into a Sith... that's not bad either for a plot.
But, for that plot to work, he should have been deployed alongside Finn to search for the droid; maybe not as equals, but not as the villain at the top; showing up in his own special ship to call the shots.
By which you mean he'd been shot? See... I don't buy him getting shot in the first place. That was pretty weaksauce too.
And I don't buy him killing his father as 'weakening him'. Even if you subscribe to the idea that he was struggling with doing it as opposed to just putting on an act to lure Han in. Doesn't matter. Either way, he would have felt resolved after committing to the path and sealing his fate.
and remember also that he is not fully trained.
But again, he WAS the primary antagonist. And if they were going to set him up as at the same skill level as Luke in Empire then his position as the leader of the Knights of Ren; Snoke's protege, and this movies Vader to Hux's Tarkin... well then the first order was absurd. They might as well have made the first order run by Ewoks.
He was much more together, saber-wise, on the other planets
Placing his total incompetence at the end in even more stark contrast. They set him up to be Vader 2.0; and then for the end fight he gets shot by a wookie, injured by green storm trooper in a lightsabre duel, and then finally defeated by a girl who had substantially less training than Luke had when he pulled his sabre out of a snow drift on hoth.
This movie would have been stronger if the Kylo / Han encounter had been more one on one. And then Kylo simply escapes. The entire fight scene with him just served to cheapen any credibility he had as potent villain.
Luke didn't confront Vader directly in ANH. Because it would have been ridiculous.
Your points are mostly well addressed in the link I provided
No. They REALLY were not. Some of the points that article made were perfectly fine, but no... items i raised were NOT addressed by the article. Or... they were addressed, but poorly.
For example, the article claims that Finn had his ass handed to him. Yes. He did. But he also got in a good hit, which just doesn't stand to scrutiny.
As for mispelling Rey; sorry, its because I only watched the movie; and hadn't been reading about it, until today.
(And yeah some of those points in that article were silly... the monsters escaping from the ship, for example, was really well covered by the movie. But then I'd also noticed while watching the movie that it did seem odd that Finn was still alive (dragged) around so much longer; and that WAS weak. The articles explanation that it showed one other guy getting dragged briefly doesn't salvage it. That's just making excuses.
you REALLY NEED TO WATCH THE MOVIE
I really did. I even enjoyed it quite a bit. Far more than any of the prequels even. But I had several complaints about the plot issues even on the drive home.
What's sad is that every one of the supposed "plot holes" like this one you picked are in fact not holes at all if you simply take ten seconds to think about what happened in the movie up to that point.
*spoiler alerts -- not that you'd be this far in the thread if you were trying to avoid them*
No, that movie is full of holes. Ray and a turncoat stormtrooper, both with basically no significant relevant training defeating Kylo at a lightsabre duel was LUDICROUS. Don't give me that shit that he was expertly trained in "energy baton fighting"... like a different obviously more experienced stormtrooper was. That he'd get within half a mile of landing a solid shot on Ren was still absurd.
See that's the issue right there. In IV-VI we only had Vader as an example of what a force user in his prime was like --- and he set the bar as: un-FUCKING-touchable. And you got the same sense that Ben and later Yoda while both old were still potent, if either of them was walking around Mos-eisley at night, they'd still be just fine. A random mugger wasn't going to get the best of them, they weren't going to die as bystanders in a drive by shooting, etc. Jedi Knights and Jedi Masters, and sith lords... they don't get hit be 'regular folks'; Han can't put a blaster round into Vader. (Bespin). Even Luke can't even land a good hit on Vader in Empire despite training with Yoda.
But hey... a green storm trooper with no real combat experience, and some presumed basic training in energy baton fighting... he can land a solid blow on Ren. And then Ray, who might be alright with a quaterstaff ends up with a sabre in her hand, she gets the job done.
That's one place the first trilogy went off the rails too. It starts out good... QuiGon and Ben start out pretty untouhcable; clearly weren't overly concerned about going in as a duo onto the trade federation ship; and clearly the trade federation leaders were extremely concerned about their chances of walking away alive from the encounter despite having a droid army with them.
But by the middle of the trilogy we are seeing full on jedi, even jedi MASTERS being taken out left and right by droids and stormtroopers. It was just so utterly disappointing.
Vader, again, was pretty much untouchable. And yeah, Ren wasn't up to Vader's level, we got that. But, I mean, if you want to explain it by saying Kylo was completely and totally ineffective and impotent idiot sith wannabe sure... but if that's the case the plot hole was making him the primary villain. Because there's no way he'd be in a position of such power if he was that easy to defeat. Somebody actually competent would be.
R2D2 waking up was deus ex machina at its finest. Sure YOU can explain it a variety of ways if YOU want to make excuses for the movie, but the movie doesn't give us anything at all.
Ray using the force to control a storm trooper was likewise absurd; suggesting she picked it up after 2 tries after being probed for information by Ren is not reasonable.
kind of like riding a bicycle successfully suddenly clicks with you...
Right, like we saw Luke deflect those remote drone bolts during sabre practice... fail, fail, fail, fail, click he got it. Right? The difference between that and this however is monumental. In THAT scene, the context was that Bben was TEACHING, and the way it cut to the scene made it indeterminate how long Luke had been practicing up to that point, or what else he'd been taught so far... but the reasonable presumption was "more than nothing".
The Ray scene, by contrast, she picks up force suggestion after basically experiencing a different force power used on her.
To return to your bicycle analogy it; It would be kind of like clicking how to ride a unicycle after someone crashes into you on a skateboard. Call her "naturally" inclined if you like, but that's shitty story writing no matter how you slice it. (aka a PLOT HOLE). And that's just scratching the surface... there's so many more.
Slashdot Mirror
As a society, we routinely engage in self-sacrificing activities for "the good of mankind".
There's big difference between voluntary and involuntary. And exploiting the desperate and sick while still calling it "voluntary" on their part is dishonest about the situation. At best its 'semi-voluntary'. If they wouldn't do it if they weren't sick or desperate than its not really completely voluntary. When I give blood, that's completely voluntary.
Stories like this play on fear, promoting the idea that pharmaceutical companies are careless and cavalier about running harmful clinical trials, when the reality is that of the tens of thousands of drug trials run every year, this one is notable specifically because it had a bad outcome.
I was specifically responding to a post wherein it was proposed that we take MORE risks with medical trials. The reason the incidence of these outcomes is so low, is precisely because the protocols in place work. Relaxing them WOULD result in more of these incidents.
There are no advertising campaigns for clinical trials, though.
Seems like this might be something worthwhile.
Your implicit assertion is that it's fine to sacrifice the few for the many, anyway.
No. It wasn't. The opposite generally.
What is actually fair, just, free, and utilitarian is giving individuals the right over their own body to volunteer for drug trials for the compensation they demand.
Sure. But that's not reality. Negotiation is never on equal footing. The poor and sick don't have the freedom to just walk away from the table if their compensation demands aren't met... they don't have a gun to their head, but they do not have good options. They cannot negotiate good deals for themselves.
And worse, if negotiation itself isn't one of their skills, they lack the resources to hire one to represent their interests better than they could.
Meanwhile, the person on the other side of the table, still eats and lives if they don't close the deal; and in many cases recruitment is their actual job -- this act of negotiation is the specific thing they are trained to do, and they are successul at their job because they are good at it.
To call it a 'free, just, and fair' when one side is severely handicapped is ridiculous bullshit.
Might as well put a guy who only plays poker once a year and barely knows the rules against a guy who plays poker professionally. On top of that the casual player will lose his apartment or be forced to drop school if he doesn't take home some winnings so he's under a lot of pressure to win, to take unnecessary risks, while the pro is financially secure, doesn't need to win, and can easily afford to lose and can make the best decision based purely on the odds (which he actually knows, while the other party is just roughly guessing at them). That's a fair match right? I mean... the deck itself is only metaphorically stacked against the poor guy, its not literally stacked against him. So ... fair?
Bullshit.
And THAT is how fair the average negotiation between a poor person and a corporation is, for anything.. .a job, a dispute, a settlement, anything.
I'll give you a no strings attached voluntary negotiation between parties for compensation for medical testing or anything else, when it's actually a level field.
Worried that poor people will disproportionately sign up for
drug trials because it pays well? Poor people are already at higher risk for injury and death and so for them it makes financial sense to better their lives at a small risk compared to their overall risk due to poverty.
The point being that the risk small to sign up precisely because of the controls in place. If we removed those controls, the risk goes up. Given that the poor do not have good options in the first place, upping the risk just forces them to assume more risk. They don't have the bargaining power to negotiate for more compensation to offset that risk. That becomes exploitation.
What are you on about?
Maybe the timing and availability are part of what they are looking for.
If they'd hired him, he'd be available.
And as for the timing, what hypothetical requirement would require that you be 'available to hire' on an arbitrary schedule?
The only candidate who would satisfy that requirement would be someone who was chronically unemployed or unemployable.
Is the idea of a "job" about you, or about the person who is willing to trade the food for the work?
Its about both. If a person expects me to sit around not trading food for work with someone else on the chance that he may wish to trade food for my work at some point one day... I'm not going to starve myself waiting on him.
I have to eat every day. You may not need me to work everyday. But if you want me to make an agreement with you such that you'll provide me food in exchange for work, AND you want exclusive access to my availability so that I am available to work when you need me to work, then you're going to have to provide me food even on days you don't need the the work. Because I'm not going to sit there and fast on the days you don't need me. And trading work for food ad hoc 'day laborer' style on the days you don't need me creates stress i don't need, work i don't want to do, and bottom line is that I can get a better deal from someone else who is willing to commit to providing me food daily, in exchange for that exclusivity and availability.
If we setup the tax system to provide me a living wage, then at that point, I'd be willing to try out your system of work-as-needed when needed for pay for the time i work.
But short of that, its not going to happen. I've specialized to do a certain type of work, and live in proximity to where that work is needed. I don't have the necessary hunter gatherer skills, nor do i live in a place where i could use them if I had them -- and neither does anybody else like me. So if you want us to do this specialized work for you, you'll need to commit to providing all my food requirements.
IF you and others like you are who need this sort of work done are not willing to, then I WILL work on my hunter gatherer skills, move somewhere where I can use them.
As it happens I do consulting; and in this role, I AM in fact willing to work for you for short stints. But I am not sitting there on a chair waiting for you to call. If you want that arrangement, fine, but then your going to need to provide food while sit there.
So instead I make deals with others all the time for short stints, so when you do call me I might not be available that day or even that week. AND I get paid quite a bit more food, because I do sometimes have stretches of not working, so I need extra food to cover that. And I'm not going to work for anyone whose just covering the food i need that for just that day, since they aren't committed to giving me work or food tomorrow.
Though no one wants to be the one who dies in testing, bringing effective drugs to mass market years, or even months faster could save many more lives than they cost in riskier testing.
That's a utilitarian argument. Morally, justifying something by putting the good of mankind over an individual leads to all kinds of truly ugly nastiness.
There are situations, of course, where people need to be sacrificed for the good of others, or the good of all, but in my opinion they are the exception.
And medical testing in particular preys on those who are desperate, or financially in need already. They may not have a gun to your head, but in most cases its not like they'd be taking the drugs if they had better choices.
Exactly right. And its also exactly right that the prosecutors office investigate to make sure that all protocols were followed.
This sort of thing is rare because the protocols to get a drug approved for human testing generally work. We know occasionally there will be events like this and its a risk we take. But in an event like this we need to establish that nobody was playing fast and loose with the protocols. Make sure data wasn't faked, make sure anything that might have predicted this wasn't suppressed or concealed, make sure the test subjects were being properly monitored, etc.
I always include a link in comments to the source of the borrowed code (or approach), because the relevant discussion will illuminate the how and why far better than a large block comment.
5, 10, or 15 years from now a 404 error illuminates nothing.
If the snippet really needs/benefits from the explanation/discussion, I usually save the page / article to PDF, with url in the header, and include that in the project, and then reference that file in the comments.
I've run into enough 404 errors over the years, where the site I originally referenced is gone, or reorganized (Microsoft for example) or have gone to a paywall model, or even cases where the article has been edited or altered; or taken down by the author so he could posted an updated one or any other reason.
I don't object to the concept of linking to the live article, but I'm not willing to take the chance that it won't be there if i ever need it.
I've never really considered whether the practice raises its own copyright issues. It probably does... so I guess it won't work where the source is being redistributed. Which is unfortunate really.
2000km south of the North Pole sounds like you'd be in a fairly warm area....
Around 71 degrees north (latitude).
So... northern alaska, greenland, northern tips of scandinavia, siberia... are all around 2000 km from the pole.
All of Iceland is further south.
The world is a big.
I did a SSD on a similiar macbook pro this year, along with a battery replacement. (i used ifixit actually). The stock drives are 5400rpm. It definitely makes a difference.
For me, Sir Alexander Dane from Galaxy Quest is his most defining role.
For another well-acted movie that pairs him with Sigourney Weaver check out Snow Cake.
I'll miss Rickman, he was an actor that I'd watch pretty much anything he was in because I'd enjoy watching him in it.
And sooner or later, that's going to happen with chat as well.
Will it though? The technology to allow interoperability has existed for years. The companies do not want interoperability though. They want to advertise, and to advertise they need control of the client.
since companies are still figuring out what to do with these messenger services and how to encode and encrypt data, and interoperate and propagate presence data in real time.
No. Its not really tricky at all to send messages to someone else. Solutions to these problems have existed for years.
your chat name could soandso@domain; a domain is mapped to a service provider. so you can be john@gmail served by gmail. or you can be john@personaldomain served by gmail, or john@personaldomain served by msn. etc, etc.
Pick a standard port number.
Message Routing is solved. Preserve the message is't delivered if you aren't mutual contacts, and spam is managed. Contact management itself is a solved problem as well.
presense propagation is as simple as registering your status with your service when you connect. there are a few strategies for communicating it from there to other services. Its not especially diffiicult.
Solutions already exist. (e.g. Jabber federation)
The companies are not "figuring out how to do it"; they've figured out that they don't want to do it. Facebook doesn't want any one messaging anyone using a client other than FB messenger. Skype doesn't want anyone messaging anyone using a client other than skype. etc etc. They all want lock-in and user counts... that creates value for their advertising efforts.
Look at Pidgin the "universal chat client". What there is mostly stuff from the 90s... ICQ, AIM, MSN. And even those don't actually talk to eachother, no pidgin still needs you to have an account on *each* supported network; and messages need to go between them. And what about the big new protocols in use?
No skype, whats app, imessage, instagram, steam, fb messenger... practically all the big new protocols go out of the way to prevent you using an unsanctioned client. And they certainly aren't interested in letting you send message outside of their networks.
Google, the one company that was allowing XMPP federation; stopped.
Chat is steadily becoming increasingly more closed.
Nope, don't want to. I'll publish what I want, when I want and there's not a damned thing you or this clown in Kentucky can do about it.
And I'll defend your right to do it too.
But you're still a complete douchebag for doing it.
FB can wind up abandoned as quickly as it gained steam. We saw that with Geocities, Hotmail, and MySpace. I can trust AT&T to be around a long time.
AT&T can fall off the map tomorrow, and phone numbers continue to work around the world. The advantage of phone and email (as technologies) over facebook messenger is that they aren't tied to a particular company AT ALL.
My email address will work independently of any company. And i move my email address from host company to company, as I see fit, or even self host if I feel the need.
My phone, likewise, I've moved between multiple carriers over the years; if carrier A started pissing me off too much, I'd move to carrier B.
The idea that you can have a messenger account with out a facebook account is just smoke and mirrors... of course you have a facebook account.
Do NOT want.
only allowed to do first-responding documentation.
The proposed law says... wait an hour to publish. It doesn't say you can't document from ground zero minute zero.
No, the crook just installs an alternative OS (like CyanogenMod) developed in another country which doesn't have the backdoor, then enable full-device encryption as usual.
LMAO.
*I* have yet to install an alternative OS on my phone. And I'm *IN* the demographic that does that sort of thing. And in the demographic that likes to do that sort of thing.
It's not as if you have to be an expert in programming and cryptography just to install and use secure software which someone else wrote.
Gotcha, so lets say we believed Windows was beholden to government masters and spooks... (wait we DO already beleive that don't we? If not as a certainty, than as a likelihood).
So criminals obviously being risk-averse must all be using something like Tails linux right? Nope... they still use windows.
'Normal' don't install alternative OSes on anything. Criminals and Terrorists... are mostly drawn from normal people. They drive cars with OnStar enabled, they use Androids and iphones and computers and tablets all with stock OSes, they sign up for xbox live with their real names. They take the same route to work every day. They pay with credit and debit cards. They don't throw away the shoes and clothes they wore when committing a crime. They don't vacuum every stray bit of hair, lint, and dead skin out of a rental car before returning it. Etc.
There are lots of things they could do to further avoid detection and capture that they don't do, because they are mostly normal.
The guy is right, what have we become?
Agreed AC.
Its hard to imagine how this could *ever* be a law I would support; due to my support for free speech and other principles.
But at the same time, I know that in most cases the posting photos of accident victims, and accidents etc to facebook and twitter is supremely disrespectful and only serves to fulfill the posters own ego and thirst for attention. Its morally indefensible.
Swing and a critical miss. How much of a tech-savvy super villain do you think you need to be to flip an option in device settings, choose a password and wait a while until it reboots?
What you gibbering about? That doesn't help you if that built in encryption is backdoored, which is precisely the scenario in question here.
If the built in encryption is backdoored, Then you have to add your own encryption layers. And that isn't something the average crook is going to try do, or get right even if he tries.
Whoosh.
You missed his point entirely.
a) His point is Snowden wouldn't compromise his trust in the first place, because he's not committing and concealing tons of crimes.
b) His point is that even if Snowden did compromise him, and leaked his activities... well ... it would be an uninteresting list that practically nobody would care about it.
As he said, he is *SNOWDEN* proof. He is not *hacker proof*.
Would it not be easier just to have everything priced appropriately?
That would hold only if everything was only purchased one at a time with nothing else in the transaction. Most transactions involve a variable number of items, and multiple items.
In Canada without the penny, something priced .99 and .98 are both a $1 if you pay cash. But if you buy 2 99 cent items its 2$ vs 2 98 cent items cost $1.95. On a shopping cart full of groceries your bill ends up within a couple cents of where it would have been otherwise.
. I'd be willing to bet there are a lot more products priced to round up rather than down sitting on the shop shelves.
At retail most priceses ended in 9 anyway, and always have. So that hasn't changed. The psychological value of not rolling over to the next dollar overweighs any effect the loss of the penny had.
And items bought in bulk... people still price and haggle to the penny, or even sub-penny per unit. Because $0.002 on a 100,000 lot of widgets or as a royalty on a million units... is still money on the bottom line.
Preventing hardware manufacturers from building strong encryption into their products accomplishes nothing.
False. It makes strong encryption off by default. So that instead just working out of the box, people have to decide to encrypt something, and go out of there way to locate and use tools to encrypt something; and deal with the hoops and hassles because its not baked in.
That accomplishes *something* pretty significant.
What this does is expose normal users to security risks, while *doing nothing to prevent any determined user to encrypt whatever the hell they want*
Swing and a miss. You are absolutely right to say that normal users are vulnerable and that determined savvy users will encrypt whatever they want.
Your unspoken assumption that terrorists and criminals are in the "determined users" category, however, is false.
Criminals and terrorists ARE mostly so-called "normal users". The vast majority of them aren't tech savvy super villains. Many of them (most of them!) aren't going to take the extra step of encrypting their communications. The recent attacks in france are a case in point -- they used good old fashioned un-encrypted SMS messages to coordinate.
Why are they using dropbox links??
(which are disabled due to bandwidth usage)
Anyone have any other download links one could try? (spybot publishes hashes so I can check them.)
Sure. But I shouldn't have to make excuses for the critters. That's the storyteller's job. (ie the movie). The critters could have simply run around with a bunch of their prey instead of just Finn... hell having Rey seal a door and rescue not just Finn, but also incidently save a thug... that would have been better. Even if said thug promptly got re-snagged...
It wasn't a well written scene. But it wasn't a "plot breaker"; like some of the other stuff.
On the other hand, Luke (at IV-V) and even moreso Ren were just posers in comparation.
Sure. But if we accept that proposition, then its ludicrous that Ren's in such a position of power and authority; acting crazy with impunity. A disgruntled storm trooper would have helped him into a bottomless pit a while ago, with a few blaster holes in his facemask.
Because if your saying Ren is Luke from a new hope, then putting him in such a position of authority on the new death star makes as much sense making Luke the commander of the rebel fleet. Remeber? They didn't even make him a suadron commander. He was just Red-5.
And, if your saying Ren was just getting out of his sith diapers, then that's what Ren should have been here. Reporting to the shiny stormtrooper and being sent to his room for a time out for breaking the computer. Do that and the his ass whooping by Rey even makes sense, and creates motivation for him want to save face by dealing with Rey in the upcoming sequels, as she develops into a Jedi he develops into a Sith... that's not bad either for a plot.
But, for that plot to work, he should have been deployed alongside Finn to search for the droid; maybe not as equals, but not as the villain at the top; showing up in his own special ship to call the shots.
but don't forget Kylo was also heavily wounded
By which you mean he'd been shot? See... I don't buy him getting shot in the first place. That was pretty weaksauce too.
And I don't buy him killing his father as 'weakening him'. Even if you subscribe to the idea that he was struggling with doing it as opposed to just putting on an act to lure Han in. Doesn't matter. Either way, he would have felt resolved after committing to the path and sealing his fate.
and remember also that he is not fully trained.
But again, he WAS the primary antagonist. And if they were going to set him up as at the same skill level as Luke in Empire then his position as the leader of the Knights of Ren; Snoke's protege, and this movies Vader to Hux's Tarkin... well then the first order was absurd. They might as well have made the first order run by Ewoks.
He was much more together, saber-wise, on the other planets
Placing his total incompetence at the end in even more stark contrast. They set him up to be Vader 2.0; and then for the end fight he gets shot by a wookie, injured by green storm trooper in a lightsabre duel, and then finally defeated by a girl who had substantially less training than Luke had when he pulled his sabre out of a snow drift on hoth.
This movie would have been stronger if the Kylo / Han encounter had been more one on one. And then Kylo simply escapes. The entire fight scene with him just served to cheapen any credibility he had as potent villain.
Luke didn't confront Vader directly in ANH. Because it would have been ridiculous.
Your points are mostly well addressed in the link I provided
No. They REALLY were not. Some of the points that article made were perfectly fine, but no... items i raised were NOT addressed by the article. Or ... they were addressed, but poorly.
For example, the article claims that Finn had his ass handed to him. Yes. He did. But he also got in a good hit, which just doesn't stand to scrutiny.
As for mispelling Rey; sorry, its because I only watched the movie; and hadn't been reading about it, until today.
(And yeah some of those points in that article were silly... the monsters escaping from the ship, for example, was really well covered by the movie. But then I'd also noticed while watching the movie that it did seem odd that Finn was still alive (dragged) around so much longer; and that WAS weak. The articles explanation that it showed one other guy getting dragged briefly doesn't salvage it. That's just making excuses.
you REALLY NEED TO WATCH THE MOVIE
I really did. I even enjoyed it quite a bit. Far more than any of the prequels even. But I had several complaints about the plot issues even on the drive home.
What's sad is that every one of the supposed "plot holes" like this one you picked are in fact not holes at all if you simply take ten seconds to think about what happened in the movie up to that point.
*spoiler alerts -- not that you'd be this far in the thread if you were trying to avoid them*
No, that movie is full of holes. Ray and a turncoat stormtrooper, both with basically no significant relevant training defeating Kylo at a lightsabre duel was LUDICROUS. Don't give me that shit that he was expertly trained in "energy baton fighting"... like a different obviously more experienced stormtrooper was. That he'd get within half a mile of landing a solid shot on Ren was still absurd.
See that's the issue right there. In IV-VI we only had Vader as an example of what a force user in his prime was like --- and he set the bar as: un-FUCKING-touchable. And you got the same sense that Ben and later Yoda while both old were still potent, if either of them was walking around Mos-eisley at night, they'd still be just fine. A random mugger wasn't going to get the best of them, they weren't going to die as bystanders in a drive by shooting, etc. Jedi Knights and Jedi Masters, and sith lords... they don't get hit be 'regular folks'; Han can't put a blaster round into Vader. (Bespin). Even Luke can't even land a good hit on Vader in Empire despite training with Yoda.
But hey... a green storm trooper with no real combat experience, and some presumed basic training in energy baton fighting ... he can land a solid blow on Ren. And then Ray, who might be alright with a quaterstaff ends up with a sabre in her hand, she gets the job done.
That's one place the first trilogy went off the rails too. It starts out good... QuiGon and Ben start out pretty untouhcable; clearly weren't overly concerned about going in as a duo onto the trade federation ship; and clearly the trade federation leaders were extremely concerned about their chances of walking away alive from the encounter despite having a droid army with them.
But by the middle of the trilogy we are seeing full on jedi, even jedi MASTERS being taken out left and right by droids and stormtroopers. It was just so utterly disappointing.
Vader, again, was pretty much untouchable. And yeah, Ren wasn't up to Vader's level, we got that. But, I mean, if you want to explain it by saying Kylo was completely and totally ineffective and impotent idiot sith wannabe sure... but if that's the case the plot hole was making him the primary villain. Because there's no way he'd be in a position of such power if he was that easy to defeat. Somebody actually competent would be.
R2D2 waking up was deus ex machina at its finest. Sure YOU can explain it a variety of ways if YOU want to make excuses for the movie, but the movie doesn't give us anything at all.
Ray using the force to control a storm trooper was likewise absurd; suggesting she picked it up after 2 tries after being probed for information by Ren is not reasonable.
kind of like riding a bicycle successfully suddenly clicks with you...
Right, like we saw Luke deflect those remote drone bolts during sabre practice... fail, fail, fail, fail, click he got it. Right? The difference between that and this however is monumental. In THAT scene, the context was that Bben was TEACHING, and the way it cut to the scene made it indeterminate how long Luke had been practicing up to that point, or what else he'd been taught so far... but the reasonable presumption was "more than nothing".
The Ray scene, by contrast, she picks up force suggestion after basically experiencing a different force power used on her.
To return to your bicycle analogy it; It would be kind of like clicking how to ride a unicycle after someone crashes into you on a skateboard. Call her "naturally" inclined if you like, but that's shitty story writing no matter how you slice it. (aka a PLOT HOLE). And that's just scratching the surface... there's so many more.